Jonathan Morrison
Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright by Paul Hendrickson
Never mind the gossip, look at the celebrated architect’s work, says Jonathan Morrison
On August 15, 1914 a servant working at the sprawling Taliesin estate that was home to Frank Lloyd Wright, the great American architect, and his mistress, Mamah, went berserk. Julian Carlton, reported to be from Barbados or Cuba, but actually from Alabama, murdered seven people with a shingling iron, a type of hand axe used in roofing.
The dead included Mamah and her two children, John, 12, and Martha, 8, and four workmen. After setting fire to the living quarters, he hid in a boiler and attempted to commit suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid. He was caught, narrowly avoided being lynched and died of starvation seven weeks later in the county jail. No explanation for his actions was ever forthcoming.
Lloyd Wright, perhaps the only architect to have his designs completed in three different centuries, was away from his Wisconsin home at the time. He had been working on a park and entertainment complex in Chicago, the city where he had made his name as a visionary, having built a series of elegant “Prairie-style” homes with their vast hipped roofs for the great and the good of the Midwest. His most famous works — the astonishing Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, completed in 1937, the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, of 1939, and the spiralling Guggenheim Museum in New York, finished in 1959 — were yet to come.
He was 47 when the tragedy struck, but famous enough that he was dogged all the way back to Taliesin by yellow-press journalists looking for a scoop. He was notorious too; he had run off to Europe with Mamah, the wife of a client and neighbour, Edwin Cheney, in 1909. In some quarters the murder was seen as divine retribution. The Chicago Sunday Herald ran an editorial that proclaimed “violent and lawless loves have violent and lawless ends” and that “the wages of sin are death”.
So the incident certainly forms a dramatic enough lure for the tale of one of the most celebrated architects. However, Plagued by Fire — the book takes its name from a phrase uttered by Lloyd Wright in frustration at a later, smaller blaze at his daughter’s wedding — struggles to rise much above the salacious reporting of 1914, always gravitating towards the scandalous and the sexual.
Paul Hendrickson, a former Washington Post journalist, declares that the book is not a standard biography, but a synecdoche in which selected incidents illuminate a greater story. So the massacre at Taliesin, dwelt on in detail, is made into a symbol of Lloyd Wright’s life, marking him as haunted and doomed. It was a catastrophe, of course, but a man who built 532 structures, designed more than 1,000 and reshaped his profession is not some stuttering, shamed failure, stalked by “disaster and disarray”, as the book puts it.
Part of the problem is that the author doesn’t seem to like Lloyd Wright, although the buildings garner some deserved praise. Yes, he wasn’t a great husband, probably not even a good father, and yes, he was by turns spendthrift and self-promoting. He was a “house builder and home breaker”, sure, although the situation with his children was more complex than that, as Hendrickson acknowledges. Do great artists have to be wonderful people? No one discards a Caravaggio painting because he once killed a man over a game of tennis.
In particular, he dislikes Lloyd Wright’s sizeable ego. “Rank egoists need to think — need the world to think — that they’re descended from the right hand of God,” Hendrickson writes. But then, have you met a successful architect who didn’t have a bit of an ego? As Lloyd Wright declared in a TV interview: “Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance.” It’s ironic that the author inserts himself into the narrative at every opportunity, dropping in memories of former girlfriends, acquaintances and site visits.
While that’s annoying, it’s nothing compared with the curtain-twitching speculation involved, usually prefaced with a line such as, “I believe, if I cannot prove”, “in some ways it is all conjecture” and “why am I thinking in such unprovable directions?” (which is by far the best question in the book). In particular, he’s fascinated by Lloyd Wright’s sexuality and attempts to out him as having had a homosexual liaison with a mentor and colleague. He also suggests that he had a relationship with a disabled, bullied schoolfriend, which seems unlikely; this was a man who married three times in quick succession. But even if he were bisexual, so what?
The frustrating thing is that Hendrickson has clearly done a lot of research and largely knows his stuff, even if it takes him off on lengthy tangents, such as racial politics in the south or the sexual infidelities of a cousin, then into a sprawling mess of conjecture, innuendo and diversion. Has so much investigation ever been done to produce so little convincing evidence? It may be impossible to libel the dead, but Hendrickson certainly gives it a good go.
Perhaps the telling line comes incidentally. He recounts how a group of Japanese tourists turned back for one last glimpse at Fallingwater as they left — and were so moved that they burst into tears. That’s what you really need to know about Frank Lloyd Wright. All the rest means nothing.
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